With Halloween out the way, November sees the start of the Christmas frenzy (which definitely feels like it gets earlier and earlier each year!). The supermarket shelves are stocked up with festive treats, high-street retailers have an array of brightly coloured Christmas jumpers and we’re all eagerly awaiting the John Lewis Christmas advert.

Christmas is a very exciting, creative and busy time of year for brands, and is a great opportunity to engage with consumers and increasingly brands are turning to social media to do this. One brand that’s doing this particularly well this year is Costa Coffee, and unless you’ve been hiding from the world of social media, you’re bound to have seen its brightly coloured (and rather cute) festive cups. Costa Coffee is encouraging customers to indulge in a #MerryChristmasToMe moment by sharing Christmas cup selfies on social media, using the hashtag, for a chance to win a seasonal surprise. The company has taken the engagement to another level by creating a dedicated webpage to share customer’s tweets and selfies, which we think is a fantastic idea! For us personally even if we didn’t win the surprise, it would still give us a real buzz to see our tweet or selfie featured on the webpage.

Greggs is also well and truly in the Christmas spirit, after launching an exclusive festive WhatsApp group for its customers. The WhatsApp group, appropriately named ‘Festive Bake Lovers’ gives loyal customers insider news on product launch dates (in particular the Festive Bake), exclusive content and competition opportunities. Customers were invited to join the group via Twitter and Facebook this week, however there is a catch – there’s only 250 places in the WhatsApp group. With such a small group customer interaction and engagement is going to be minimal, which may make some people question the point entirely. Rather than going down the root of mass customer engagement, this feels to us as more of a PR stunt. The WhatsApp group will run up until Christmas, with the Festive Bake arriving in Greggs store across the country early next week.

Christmas is already an exciting time of year, but we are looking forward to seeing brand creativity this festive season and the many different ways they try to engage with consumers.